Public investment spending declined steadily in advanced economies during the last three decades. Germany is a case in point where the aggregate decline coincided with growing inequality in investments across districts. What explains variation in local investment spending? We assembled a novel...

In May 2020, for the first time in its history, the Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) of Germany declared Union acts as being ultra vires. According to the FCC, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) had acted beyond their mandates because they did...

Rising wealth inequality is both a topic in recent policy discussion and in the social sciences. Despite the general interest in wealth concentration, we know only little about the largest privately held fortunes. To help fill this gap we analyze the historical origins of Germany's 1,032 largest...

Relying on panel data for Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the paper examines the impact of union membership on partisan preferences. By leveraging panel data to control for time-invariant selection effects, we show that unions exert a small consistent left-wing...

This paper looks at changes in macrosociological paradigms for social development that traditionally stretch from the primitive society through the stratified medieval society to the image of a functionally differentiated modern society. Changing the perspective from a systems theoretical view...

While research on the economic characteristics of growth models across countries is now extensive, research on the politics of growth models is still in its infancy, even though governments routinely pursue different strategies to generate growth. In particular, we lack evidence on (1) whether...

Decarbonization requires the winding down of - economically - fully viable, if not highly prosperous, lines of economic activity. Different from past episodes of industrial restructuring revolving around the managed decline of sunset industries, accelerating climate change requires reallocation...

Germany is known for its family-owned businesses that transfer ownership across generations. However, business owners in Germany increasingly envision selling their business beyond the family, which fundamentally changes the institutionalized way private ownership of businesses is transferred....

Has the strategy of the "external constraint" (voluntarily limiting the country's policy-making discretion by tying it to the European mast) contributed to Italy's stagnation over the past twenty-five years? The existing literature is divided on this question. The dominant interpretation is that...

The COVID-19 pandemic may lead to a resurgence of the euro crisis. In this context, Italy seems particularly vulnerable: support for the euro is lower than in most other eurozone countries, and a possible exit could have serious consequences for the common currency. Based on a novel survey...